Investing Strategies to Win Your Fantasy Football League

The NFL season brings with it one of the most unproductive hobbies that exists: Fantasy Football (F.F.). A study from 2023 estimated that F.F. leads to productivity loss in the workplace of more than $16 billion in the US, or about $1 billion per week.

Despite the loss is productivity in the workplace, F.F. is growing at an exponential pace, getting not only hardcore fans caught up in the action, but also casual fans. It can be a lot of fun to pick a team and compete with your friends or strangers on a weekly basis. Similarly to investing, your success doesn't necessarily come down to your intelligence.

Of course, having a deeper understanding of F.F. and how it all works will help you. But there's also a lot of luck, chance, and things you couldn't have possibly dreamt of, that influence your success. Its unpredictability makes it incredibly frustrating and entertaining – depending what side of the coin you're on.

Whether you're a seasoned pro, or drafting a team for the very first time, we can look to foundational investment values to help give us a better chance of winning our league.

Find Value

Warren Buffett is widely regarded as the greatest investor of all time. His success has come from his ability to identify companies that are undervalued compared to their potential. With F.F., we're looking at a timeline of 17 weeks, not multiple decades, but it's still possible to find high value players in every round of your draft.

Regardless of your position in the draft, every team ends up with the same amount of players. Your ability to win week after week doesn't come down to only one player, but every player on your roster. The top end players are ones that everyone will know. Outside of a select few, most top tier players will perform relatively similarly.

As you get deeper into the draft, that's when your value picks will really show. Selecting a slightly worse player who is a starter and will get reps, can have more potential than a better player who's a backup. The player with more opportunities should have more upside potential.

Buffett doesn't invest in a company unless he understands everything about it, and he believes in it. When you're drafting players, understand who you're drafting and their team dynamic. Drafting a player for the sake of drafting that player, could be the most expensive decision you make.

Diversification

Depending on your league set up, you'll only be able to start a specific number of players at each position. In order to really compete each and every week, you need to be well balanced at each position. Having great players sit on your bench because you have better players at that position, doesn't help you.

Diversifying at each position protects you from loss at that position. Let's say your star player goes down with an injury, you'll want players already on your team that you can substitute in. There's few things worse in F.F. than desperately throwing a random nobody into your lineup.

You can also look at diversifying across teams. Sometimes a team will be set up to thrived based on one player. Look at the 2011 Colts, with Payton Manning at QB they were Super Bowl favourites, they ended up finishing last that year because he was injured. Going all in on a team's players expecting them to do well could go great, like last year with the Miami Dolphins, but it can also be disastrous.

With investing, diversification allows us to capture the good, while avoiding the really bad. As long as we're participating, we'll be able to capture the overall returns, without taking unnecessary risk. The same is true for F.F., having your players spread out will allow you to capture their upside (assuming they are on good offences), without completely relying on them – especially considering their bye week.

Unemotional Decision Making

When something doesn't quite go your way, it's easy to overreact and make a bad decision you wouldn't have otherwise made. With investing, it looks like selling when the market is down, or chasing a hot stock to only follow it down. We can get caught up, shortsighted, and quickly compound bad decisions.

The same thing happens in F.F. when your favourite player or team lets you down. It's important to remember that whatever has happened, has already happened. You can't change it. All you can do is reevaluate the information that's available to you, so you can make a better decision moving forward. That decision is based made from a logical point of view, rather than an emotional one.

Remove yourself from the emotion (this might take some time), and think back to what your thought process initially was. Then ask yourself, "did I: make a bad decision, not have all of the information I should have in order to make an informed decision, or did I get unlucky?" Figure out what went wrong and build a plan to avoid having it happen again.

Just because something didn't go your way, doesn't necessarily mean that you made a bad decision. As I said earlier, luck and the unknown play a huge role in F.F., but the decisions we make as a result, are what can offset or compound those bits of chance.

Avoid Anchoring

It's important to know when you cut your losses. Everyone makes decisions that don't play out the way we thought they would. Knowing when to cut your losses is the difference between getting a burn and going down with the ship.

Anchoring to a specific player can make you blind to the reality surrounding them. To extend on Unemotional Decision Making, you have to make the best decision you can, with the information you have at that time. As that information changes, so too can your thought process.

Maybe a high draft pick got injured, is underperforming, or are clearly past their prime. Instead of continuing to put that player into your lineup, hoping for a miracle, sit them on your bench, or see if someone is willing to make you a solid trade (let them anchor to the player instead!).

It's okay to deviate from your original plan, as long as it's the correct thing to do. Correct meaning past a specific moment, we're thinking in the timeline of best thing to do moving forward as a whole. Just like we don't want to sink our ship based on a single investment, we don't want to sink our team based on a single player.

Have A Plan

Investing success comes down to having a plan, and the ability to stick to it for as long as possible. Instead of trying to chase the best returns in any given year, long-term success comes from achieving average returns for an above average period of time.

Last year in F.F., the weeks that I lost were more so because I had multiple players put up a bad game rather than my opponent hitting grand slams with their players. You want a high floor built on good consistent players, and sprinkle in some high ceiling upside. Similarly to how we want our portfolios to mostly be made up of companies that can endure, but still have upside potential.

A plan will never go perfectly according to plan. But having an ideal direction you want to move towards, can be reassuring and grounding when things eventually go sideways (because they will). What we want to avoid, is allowing bad luck or a bad decision to compound and snowball into something much bigger than itself. Having an idea of what we can regularly expect to happen, will reduce the surprise when they do happen.

Good luck and may the Fantasy Football Gods be on your side.

Keep doing things your future self will thank you for.